New SFM ad: If smoking is essential to your film, stand up and take the R-rating.

Smoke Free Movies has launched a series of print advertisements in Variety and other publications. This advertisement first ran in the August 23, 2011 edition of Variety and September 2, 2011 edition of The Hollywood Reporter.

If smoking is essential to your film, stand up and take the R-rating.

Producers of comic book movies seem to think flying saucers and cigarettes go together. Other producers appear to be convinced that any melodrama set before 2005 is a solemn opportunity to show people chain smoking.

Do you believe either one of these things? Then stand up for what you believe. Take the R-rating.

Example #1:Cowboys & Alienswas released by Universal, a studio that presumes its kid-rated movies will be smokefree. Yet Universal suspended its standard for this PG-13 Western-Scifi mashup. Reliance and Relativity provided most of the financing. Did they override Universal? Who else thought it was absolutely vital to show fourteen-year-olds a cowboy hero smoking?

Example#2: Last week, The Help(PG-13, backed by Reliance and Imagenation Abu Dhabi) derailed Disney’s smokefreetrack record. Set fifty years ago in Mississippi, The Helpindulges in what The Hollywood Reportercalled “ubiquitous” smoking. Whateverthe Jackson Junior League might really have been up to in 1962, smoking rates among lower-income people in Mississippi today are among the nation’s highest.It doesn’t help that Mississippi offers film producers $20 million a year to make movies like The Help— twice as muchmoney as the state invests in tobacco prevention.

Display your integrity.Other major studios have much worse records than Universal (Comcast) and Disney (see table). But if even the major studios that have explicit policies to discourage smoking in their youth-rated movies can’t or won’t consistently protect young audiences, an industry wide R-rating is the only thing that can.

If you’re a producer, it’s unrealistic to claim that your film with smoking is uniquely harmless. And testing your clout by insisting on smoking in a film is just plain callous.

If smoking is essential to your movie, then stand up and take an “R.”If the smoking’s not so important, why include it at all?

Led by Viacom (1.8 billion) and News Corp. (1.6 billion), youth-rated films delivered fivebilliontobacco impressions to domestic theater audiences by mid-August 2011.

Smoke Free Movies

Smoking in movies kills in real life. Smoke Free Movie policies—the R-rating, certification of no payoffs, anti-tobacco spots, and an end to brand display—are endorsed by the World Health Organization, American Medical Association, AMA Alliance, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Heart Association, Legacy, American Lung Association, Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, American Public Health Association, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Los Angeles County Dept. of Health Services, New York State Dept. of Health, New York State PTA, and many others. Visit our web site or write: Smoke Free Movies, UCSF School of Medicine, San Francisco, CA 94143-1390.